> Real-world applications are rarely solely limited by small chunks of code that are simple enough to be optimized independently of the rest of the program. Tw

> Real-world applications are rarely solely limited by small chunks of code that are simple enough to be optimized independently of the rest of the program. Two reactions to this: 1. If they aren't, maybe they should be. Not sure the large applications of the past are a good guide to the future. Perhaps a large pile of functional code is a clear software engineering win for some value of "large," and we're still discovering this. 2. In my experience, large applications are often performance-limited by small chunks of code. The results of actually profiling never cease to amaze me -- my guesses are so often wrong. Of course, once you fix the bottleneck in one spot, the bottleneck moves to another, but hey that's the game of optimization in any language.